LONDON – “It is a maddening circle of suspicion and fear,” editorializes the New York Times. But this is how it has always been since the days of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the British government gave the official nod to the Zionists who wanted to re-create a biblical homeland on what for 700 years, until the break-up of the Ottoman empire in the wake of Turkey’s defeat in World War 1, had been Muslim territory. In all the intervening years not once have the two parties been at a common point of compromise at the same time.
The Balfour Declaration was a misguided attempt to meet the vision of what were then a relatively few Jewish idealists who wished to turn back the historical clock. If every ethnic group in the world asserted so vigorously ancient yearnings the world would become totally chaotic in a very short time, and none quicker than the North American continent itself. Indeed if there hadn’t been the holocaust many years later it is doubtful if either the U.S. or Europe would have felt the deep pangs of guilt that solidified their, until then, wavering support for the Zionist enterprise. Nor would so many Jews have taken the Zionist ideal so seriously.
In 1936, twelve years before the British decided to throw up their hands and withdraw from Palestine, they came up with their own plan for partition. At that moment it looked as if London had belatedly understood the reasons for Arab hostility and resistance and had responded reasonably intelligently, in a way they should have thought of in 1917. Yet the Arabs refused what by today’s standards would be regarded as a good deal. They couldn’t accept partition just as the Israeli right can’t accept it today. Besides they always maintained that Palestine had been twice promised. During the struggle to undermine the Ottoman Empire, Britain had told the Palestinians they too would get their homeland in return for cooperation.
The Jewish population has not, until relatively recently, favoured partition. Yet the leadership of Israel at important moments has pushed for it. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who led the war of independence when, in the wake of the departing British, three neighboring states attacked Israel, worked hard to restrain the urgings of his generals to seize the West Bank. Ben-Gurion preferred legitimacy to real estate. After the later 1967 war when Israel had overrun the West Bank the then retired Ben-Gurion said Israel must unilaterally withdraw from the occupied territories. But he was ignored and the settlement movement began, although it was only a small minority who thought this a sensible idea. At this point it might have been relatively easy to squash it. But Washington connived with the settlement mood, even allowing tax exemptions for organizations who subsidized the settlers. At that time the U.S. was in the thick of the Cold War and instinctively pro Israel, since the country had humiliated the Soviet Union’s Middle Eastern clients. It was a great historical moment for compromise missed. Palestinian sentiment was prepared to back a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was still a marginal group and the Palestinians docile. The Israelis had captured it without firing a shot. Around this time Israeli intelligence began to encourage Hamas, the militant “Greater Palestine” movement as a balance to the PLO, just as later the CIA gave financial and arms support to the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to resist the Soviet occupying army.
Over the years, as the settlers have grown both numerically and politically strong, the wise perceptions of Ben-Gurion were relegated to the distant background until Yitzhak Rabin won the premiership and earnestly began to try and break the impasse, only to be felled by an assassin from the settler movement. A later Labour government led by Ehud Barak tried to do the same, becoming tantalizing close to settling a deal on the terms of formal partition. If on less generous lines that the British plan of 1936 or Ben-Gurion’s ideas, it was, given the sea of bitterness on the Israeli side and the strength of the settler lobby, nothing less than miraculous. The PLO head Yasser Arafat inexplicably turned it down, although his negotiators, along with Barak’s, showed in the subsequent negotiations at Taba, just before the Israeli election that led to Sharon’s victory, that the gaps between the two sides that had not been closed at Camp David were quite bridgeable.
Is this what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon means when he said earlier this week that “The moment has arrived to divide this tract of land between us and the Palestinians”? Or is it a ploy to buy time with the Bush Administration that seems at last to be stepping up the pressure. There is nothing to suggest in Sharon’s past that he is a Ben-Gurion figure. Yet for all the rightwing leanings of his government and the strength of the settlers the opinion polls show, as they have since the time of Rabin, that most of the time a good majority of Israelis want such a settlement. For the first time Egypt and Saudi Arabia are behind it. Sharon must know that if in 86 years the Palestinian cause could not be squashed it is unlikely he can do it now. Some sort of compromise he appears to realize is inevitable. But for it to work over the next 86 years it has to be a generous one, otherwise there is simply no point- “the maddening circle of suspicion and fear”, that leads to more and more violence destroying the economies and livelihoods, not to mention that precious state, the peace of mind, of both sides will never be broken.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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